Classic Jurassic: A cynical rehash of a winning formula? No, the fourth in the dino franchise is spectacular and scary

Every once in a cinematic blue moon, someone manages to spring a real surprise with a film and, thrillingly, that’s exactly what’s happened with Jurassic World.

I mean, all we critics dutifully trooped in to see what we confidently expected would be little more than Jurassic Park IV, yet another cynical attempt to cash in on the enduring popularity of both dinosaurs and the 1993 original.

And then Steven Spielberg – who directed the original, only takes an executive producer credit here but whose creative pawprints are all over it – weaves his magic and, two hours later, we all came out with silly grins on our faces.

Steven Spielberg apparently hand-picked the little-known Colin Trevorrow to direct Jurassic World and the 39-year-old Californian certainly does not disappoint

Because Jurassic World, against all the odds, is fantastic, more than capable of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Spielberg’s original and undoubtedly the blockbuster picture of the summer.

For this is one of those rare films that just gets better as it goes on, not so much gently allaying any initial doubts you might have as steam-rollering them.

Spielberg apparently hand-picked the little-known Colin Trevorrow to direct the picture and the 39-year-old Californian certainly does not disappoint, delivering a film that is spectacular, scary, bone-achingly tense at times and just-the-right-amount-of-funny at others.

Helped by the winning screen chemistry between Bryce Dallas Howard and Guardians Of The Galaxy star Chris Pratt, there’s an attractive hint of romance too. What more could you want in a summer blockbuster?

The huge success of the original rested on those brilliant visual effects, which redefined state-of-the-art in the early Nineties and were so good that you did wonder whether they could be improved on.

Well, the short answer is they can, but one of the real strengths of Jurassic World is that you barely notice.

Yes, it’s stunning to see a giant mosasaurus leap from its lake to be fed with a great white shark and yes, these velociraptors really do look as if they are there (mind you, they were pretty convincing in the original).

Chris Pratt may not have the looks of Harrison Ford or Michael Douglas but he’s funnier than either and certainly fills their action-hero/love-interest boots

But you never find yourself thinking ‘Wow, great visual effects,’ and that’s because the underlying story is so cleverly constructed and strong, particularly when it comes to pacing and the tying of the new film to the original.

Because not only is Jurassic World set on the same tropical island off the coast of Costa Rica as Jurassic Park, it begins with the great vision of John Hammond – played by Richard Attenborough in the original – having come true.

There is a theme park where tourists come in their thousands to see real-life dinosaurs that have been brought back to life by genetic engineers.

There’s just one problem – by now, the park’s visitors have grown accustomed to seeing dinosaurs; if the crowds are to keep coming they need something bigger, better and scarier than before.

Which is why they’ve started producing special genetic hybrids – a bit of T-rex DNA there, a splice or two or raptor there, a dollop of tree-frog genes for flavour.

No good will come of this, we know, but 16-year-old Zach (Nick Robinson) and his younger brother, Gray (Ty Simpkins), don’t – they are just here for a few days’ holiday with their aunt Claire (Howard), the immaculate, white-clad control-freak who runs the park for its new owner, Simon Masrani, played by Life Of Pi star Irrfan Khan.

There is a theme park where tourists come in their thousands to see real-life dinosaurs that have been brought back to life by genetic engineers

For a brief while, there are signs that Jurassic World might be aiming a little low.

The sight of Gray looking at 3D pictures of dinosaurs through an old Viewmaster stereoscope hints at self-congratulatory smugness, while the vintage Jurassic Park T-shirt that a control-room operator wears to work smacks of going after easy laughs.

But then you realise the Jurassic World research lab is not only still being run by Dr Henry Wu from the original film, he’s being played by the same actor, B D Wong, and that’s an undeniably nice touch. This could still come good, you think, and, boy, does it.

Pratt may not have the looks of Harrison Ford or Michael Douglas but he’s funnier than either and certainly fills their action-hero/love-interest boots, helped by the fact that he’s the messy, disorganised polar opposite of the uptight, career-dedicated Claire.

And he’s a dinosaur whisperer too, who can halt an advancing raptor with nothing more than a raised hand: show me a woman who could resist that.

The reliably classy Howard, however, has an awful lot of fun while the inevitable is temporarily postponed.

IT'S A FACT

Velociraptors look huge in the Jurassic films – but scientists believe that the real ones were actually the size of turkeys and covered in feathers.

What else impresses? Well, nearly everything. I love the fact that an initially silly-sounding sub-plot about ‘weaponising’ dinosaurs eventually comes extremely good, just as I love that several of the close encounters with these killer reptiles not only cleverly reference the original film but also earlier special-effects classics such as King Kong and One Million Years BC.

The visual effects aren’t always 100 per cent convincing but they are always 100 per cent entertaining.

Elsewhere, the mundane detail of the theme park is stunning – the merchandising, the inevitable ‘Main Street’, the endless queues for rides.

Amid the stream of recorded announcements, do listen out for the one about a ‘containment anomaly’.

Frankly it comes a bit late, for by then the big one, the intelligent one, the genetically modified one – indominus rex – has been out for hours, just as Claire’s two teenage charges suddenly go missing.

‘She’s learning where she is in the food chain,’ explains Owen (Pratt) to the park’s alarmed managers. ‘But I’m not sure you want her to figure that out.’ Oh but we do, we definitely do.

But, be warned, for while Jurassic World is pretty much unmissable, it could easily terrify little ones. Big ones may find it quite scary too.

SECONDSCREEN

London Road Cert: 15 Time: 1hr 35mins ★★★★★ (no stars)

The year is not even halfway through and yet I can already confidently predict that if you have a stranger evening in the cinema all year than the one you spend watching London Road, I shall be astonished.

Even its most ardent supporters – and the theatre production it is based on certainly had many – would have to concede that it rests on the very oddest of ideas.

So what is it? Well... In 2006, you may recall, five Ipswich prostitutes were murdered by the serial killer Steve Wright.

On the big screen London Road comes across as a smug, patronising example of the worst sort of creative showing-off (pictured: Olivia Colman, centre, and Anita Dobson, second from right)

He lived on London Road, the same part-residential, part-industrial road where many prostitutes solicited for work.

Writer Alecky Blythe interviewed local residents about the problems caused by the prostitutes and what it was like waking up to discover that you were living next door to a serial killer.

Their verbatim responses – complete with every ‘um’, ‘er’ and superfluous ‘and’ – were then set to music.

So, from the moment a television reporter suddenly starts to impart an unexpectedly tuneful lilt to his grim report, 80 to 90 per cent of London Road is sung.

The result is a somewhat macabre yet very mundane modern opera, which I... absolutely hated.

I didn’t see the National Theatre production on which this Rufus Norris-directed picture is based, but up on the big screen London Road comes across as a smug, patronising example of the worst sort of creative showing-off. Look how clever we arty metropolitan types are, it seems to be saying.

We can turn almost anything into a show. And they’re right, they can; but that doesn’t mean they should. It’s partly the strict adherence to the residents’ verbatim accounts that so insults, with every pause and stumble meticulously reproduced, along with varying degrees of easily mocked Suffolk accent.

But also provoking is the sight of stars such as Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman and Anita Dobson doing ‘ordinary’, lending their familiar faces to unfamiliar lives and, again, sticking to that absolutely verbatim delivery.

Time and again, I was reminded of Nick Park’s Creature Comforts, when words that certainly sounded as if they had come from vox-pop interviews were put into the mouths of zoo animals.

This time, however, the joke is on the poor London Road residents.

An early and modestly catchy market-square chorus of ‘Everyone is very nervous... um, and’ flatters to deceive because from the moment two silly teenage girls break into ‘You absolutely think it could be him; I’m just going to, like, cry’, words and music come together in ever more forgettable ways.

Wright himself never appears here, but his five victims’ families don’t get much of a hearing either.

Colman’s central character of Julie brings the tedium to a distinctly inharmonious close by admitting that, three years on, she still thinks Wright’s victims are ‘better off ten feet under’ and that she’d ‘shake his hand and say thank you very much’ for getting rid of them.

Not often you get hung out to dry and turned into song at the same time, but that’s London Road. Definitely not for me.